To Cynthia the name was quite unfamiliar. There had been no Walter Hemming at Bramling.
"He was one of my officers on the Perhaps. He has got together some money, has bought the old ship and is off to the South."
"He takes up your work?"
"Yes. I never saw a man so enthusiastic. Suppose he reaches the Pole, what then?" Harry Rames laughed contemptuously.
"Aren't there discoveries to be made, maps to be drawn of that continent and something to be learned from the soundings?" asked Cynthia, recollecting Harry Rames's own book upon his voyage. He shook his head.
"That's all trimmings, Cynthia. You have got to surround your expedition with a scientific halo. It gets you money, and official support, and the countenance of the learned societies. But the man who goes south into the Antarctic goes with just one reason--to reach the Pole. Why? You can't give a rational answer to that Cynthia. No one can. Such men are just driven on by a torment of their souls."
No stranger watching Harry Rames as he speculated with an indulgent smile upon the aimlessness of Walter Hemming's long itinerary could have imagined that he had once himself led just such an expedition. Even Cynthia found the fact difficult of belief. By so complete a dissociation of spirit he was cut off from the race of the wanderers.
"Let a man become insane in the East," he continued, "and he's looked upon as a holy man, touched by the finger of God. The fellows who go South and North are our holy men of the West." He turned back again to his newspaper, and then uttered an exclamation:
"They have offered that Under Secretaryship to Edgington!"
"Of course he'll refuse it," said Cynthia.